The improvement of telecommunications has yielded a great increase of tele-meetings between remote colleagues. These virtual meetings can use different media, such as the phone or the Internet. Different means of interacting with the other parties are offered, either audio (for example a telephone set, either fixed or cellular) or video. It is now common to have many people active in such virtual meetings calling from different areas of the globe. Thus, in a phone conference, one participant has to interact with different people that one often doesn't know beforehand, and sometimes in a language different from one's mother tongue.
It may be difficult for a participant to distinguish between the other participants as they may talk at any time without each time presenting themselves, have similar voices, etc., making it difficult to distinguish who is actually speaking. A system that helps the participant in distinguishing between the different participants during a phone conference would then be very useful. Such a system would have to recognize the different participants and then make a representation of them that the participant can easily decipher and use to facilitate interaction with other participants. For a system to identify other participants, it can either recognize the calling device or the calling person, the two options offering different capabilities. Then a user-friendly representation of the conference call must be built by the system and presented to the participant, under a text, audio or video format.
Different systems have been designed pertaining to the identification of callers and a representation of a conference call to a participant. U.S. Pat. No. 6,868,149 describes a system to display information about any one caller on a telephone or computer screen of the participant. Each caller is identified using a combination of different means, such as line sensing and voice identification.
While previous inventions offer various means for identifying callers, they never provide the participant with a user-friendly representation of the conference call. In addition they may require expensive display facilities (such as a personal computer screen) as all the caller identifications may not fit on a regular phone screen. Moreover, they are useless for participants with viewing disabilities.